Top 10 Colorado Craft Beers

We recently paid a visit to Colorado to sample the local beer scene, which plays host to the annual Great American Beer Festival and boasts a staggering 160-plus craft breweries of its own. We started our search at the favorite craft brewer hangout, the Falling Rock Taphouse – home of the famous "No crap on tap" lineup of 86 draft beer lines. "The beer in Colorado is great and it's brewed by great people," says Taphouse owner Chris Black, who gave us the lowdown on Colorado's biggest standard-bearing breweries. "What's really fun for me is getting to meet and hang out with these people that are my heroes." Between his advice and some pavement-pounding, liver-destroying investigative work of our own, we narrowed the field to 10 of the most exciting beers we've ever had in Colorado – or any other state.

Wynkoop Brewing Company - Colorojo

How much do Coloradans love their beer? Enough to elect John Hickenlooper, the founder of Denver's first brewpub, Wynkoop Brewing Company, into the governor's chair. Taste the beer, and you might cast a vote yourself. In general, we've found brewpub beer, in Denver as elsewhere, to be a decidedly hit-or-miss affair. At Wynkoop, there were more hits than misses, and we enjoyed a couple of great ones while we shot some pool in the brewery's massive billiards hall on the second floor.

We liked its IPA, but the best beer at Wynkoop is called Colorojo – a massively hoppy imperial red that dripped with citrus and helped soothe the separation anxiety that we felt from missing out on prime Nugget Nectar season on the East Coast.